Idle Hush thoughts [Old, old spoilers]

So when I finished reading Hush (once the thirteen-year-old was finished with it), I decided to have another look at the Red Hood trades.

Now, when Hush was written, were they planning then on Jason Todd coming back in actuality?

In Hush (if you haven't read it, and if you have and I've gotten something wrong please feel free to correct me), there's a scene near the end of the arc where Batman meets "Jason" in a graveyard, only to discover in the end that it's not actually Jason, it's Clayface.

In the Red Hood trade, there's a scene at the end (I think it was in an annual, not in the original Red Hood storyline) that tells something about real-Jason's history; among other things, it expands on the Hush scene, saying that it was real-Jason that Batman met at the graveyard, but only for part of the fight--at some point he switched places with Clayface and left the scene.

As far as I can see, there's no way to figure out exactly which parts of the Hush scene feature (in retrospect/retcon) real-Jason and which feature Clayface. The later scene matches up pretty well visually, so I guess we can assume that the switch was made near the end of the fight, but you can't really do it from the dialogue or from the art, which may have been the point.

What I found amusing was that the main reasons Batman figured out that it wasn't real Jason were (a) he didn't call him "Bruce," and (b) real-Jason kind of sucked (i.e. the Clayface Jason was too good to be the real thing). The Red Hood story answered the skill issue by emphasizing that Jason had had additional training. Also interesting was his comment that Jason appeared to be as old as Nightwing, which works for Hush but not really for Red Hood. Not that age estimation is an exact science, except maybe for Batman...

So with all that, I've got to assume that when Hush was written, Red Hood was in no one's mind.

However, the last bit of the Hush story features the Riddler, who refuses to tell when Batman asks him what did happen to Jason's grave. Which does sort of indicate that there were plans of some sort there for Jason.